I've barely played this game in all the years I've used Supermodel, but today I had a few plays of it and something strikes me as wrong with the handling and speed.

Maybe there's supposed to be a loss of speed when you steer and that would seem logical, but I compared to a video on YouTube and my max speed never really tops 315 km/h with the fastest car when on a straight, while theirs was ripping through to max 357 quite easily. So it seems to be suppressed but I can't figure out why.

The test mode shows the input values as normal and no conflict when I steer. I even tried using a button for analog acceleration instead of a trigger.

Ah, so the video I was comparing to I thought was a direct capture of Supermodel but it seems it was actually an original game because I noticed a brief bit of lighting on the car select screen. I'm sure that there's a speed issue and the game would be quite winnable if were unrestricted.

I also noticed if you do run the Memory Test, it says the last ROM is bad (named as ic20). Might that be affecting this?

The IC test is failing because of ROM patches being applied to get the game to boot (related to the network board and some other things). These would not affect car handling.

I've found the game rather odd as well but having never played it in the arcades I can't say for sure whether it's correct or not. I thought someone (MrThunderwing?) had posted a video of winning a race in Supermodel?

Top speed will be different between automatic and manual mode, by the way, although the difference is usually not that drastic. At one point it was suggested that the gear shifting controls might be implemented incorrectly (that rather than just two gears -- high and low -- the shifter is sequential). Can anyone confirm the correct behavior?

Bart wrote: I've found the game rather odd as well but having never played it in the arcades I can't say for sure whether it's correct or not. I thought someone (MrThunderwing?) had posted a video of winning a race in Supermodel?

Not me I'm afraid, I don't think I've ever placed higher than 7th in Le Mans. I have a question though - how come Le Mans doesn't have any force feedback like the other Model 3 racers? Is it part of the ROM that's missing or did the original game just not have any FFB? I'm sure this is something that's probably been asked before...

I flipped back and forth about this, but I figured it out a while back. It's not an emulation problem, just something odd about the game, even on arcade. There's an option in the settings for Special Car. I don't know why they did this, it doesn't make any sense and kinda cons you out of money. In every game where there's an advertised top speed on the car select screen, you can more or less reach it if you're racing well. In Le Mans 24, you can only do that with one standard car at a time, the one car you define as the special car.

I noticed it when watching arcade players. You know the lineup of cars? If a special car is defined, this one will be highlighted first when you press start. If you pick anything else, you basically can't win because you're much slower. The secret cars remain unaffected.